Every show has a booking page and every booking page is a form. A host who wants guests fills in Podmatch, MatchMaker, a Calendly and a Google Form, and each holds half of what a guest needs to know. An expert who is happy to be interviewed fills in a guest-matching site, a speaker bureau, a press page and a line in a bio, and each holds a different fragment: the topics on one, the availability on another, the fee nowhere. Both wrote the answers once and gave them to forms that will not hand them back.
Broadcasters and guests is the framework every live audio show runs on, radio, podcasts, live rooms, streams. Today OpenProfile.md gets both halves as sections, so a host and a guest can be matched from two files rather than two forms.
OpenBroadcast
OpenBroadcast is the Broadcast section of a host's OpenProfile.md: what they host and who they are looking for.
## Broadcast
- **Show**: The Analytical Engine
- **Kind**: podcast
- **Format**: interview
- **Cadence**: weekly
- **Length**: 45 min
- **Audience**: 12k downloads/episode
- **Topics**: computing history, mathematics, women in science
- **Seeking**: historians, engineers with a story, first-time guests welcome
- **Not**: crypto, product pitches
- **Slots**: Tue and Thu 18:00-20:00 Europe/London
- **Pays**: no
- **Charges**: no
Pays and Charges are unstated by default and shown as unstated, because pay-to-play is the thing a guest most wants to know and is most often not told.
OpenGuest
OpenGuest is the Guest section of a person's file: that they will appear, what they can speak to, when, on what terms, and where they have been heard before.
## Guest
- **Available**: yes
- **Expertise**: analytical engines, early computing, mathematics education
- **Pitch**: Wrote the first program for a machine that was never built, and can explain why that matters now.
- **Availability**: weekday evenings, some weekends
- **Remote**: preferred
- **Rate**: free
- **Pays**: no
- **Appeared on**: [The Analytical Engine](https://ada.example/podcast/ep12)
- **Credentials**: Countess of Lovelace; first published algorithm, 1843
- **Not**: crypto, pay-to-play, politics
There is no separate expert spec. An expert is a guest with Expertise and Credentials, and the detail lives in the Resume link the profile already carries.
Matching
A booking platform reads both sections and scores the pair from what both wrote: the host's Topics and Seeking against the guest's Expertise and Topics, Slots against Availability, Pays and Charges against Rate and Pays. Both Not keys are absolute. Everything else is a score, and the platform says how it scored. The platform never fills a key the person did not write, from a feed, a photo, a past episode or another site. What is not written is unstated.
The files live where OpenProfile.md already lives: /.well-known/openprofile.md on the person's domain, or linked from any platform page with rel="openprofile". A show with its own domain serves its own profile with the Broadcast section under it, and a Host key pointing at the host's file, with the host's Accounts pointing back, is the verification.
We are building a platform that matches on these. The specs are at logicsrc.com/docs/openbroadcast and logicsrc.com/docs/openguest, CC BY 4.0. Write the section once, in a file you own, and every platform that reads OpenProfile.md can book you.
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